Photo: SH Design via AdobeStock “‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said, / ‘To talk of many things: / Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax — / Of cabbages — and kings — / And why the sea is boiling hot — / And whether pigs have wings.’”—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass “Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding …
Continue reading Stepping through the Looking Glass: A Journey through Speculative Fiction
Published by John Murray, 2013, 431 pages. Can you imagine a world without alphabets? They are such an essential part of our lives; the letters help us form words to express ourselves and communicate with others. Take, for example, the “English” alphabet—which is what Michael Rosen’s book is about. It feels like it has been …
Continue reading Alphabetical—How Every Letter Tells a Story: Michael Rosen
Photo: FU via Adobe Stock Crime fiction has consistently been one of the most popular genres—in 2014, around one in three novels published in English was a crime novel.[1] What makes this genre so popular? For one, the plot is a puzzle, challenging the reader to guess who done it—which was what first attracted me …
This article was first published in Teacher Plus, May-June 2024 (https://www.teacherplus.org/building-bridges-through-stories/) Photo: bee boys via Shutterstock Stories are an integral part of our lives. They shape us and are the way in which we remember, turning our lives into narratives. As children, we are raised on fables and fairy tales that teach us how to …
Photo: Hillaire via Flickr “Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You …
Photo: bee boys via Shutterstock A decade ago, the first post went up on Talking About Books, announcing its arrival. The first review followed soon after, exactly 10 years ago today.[1] This post is a way of taking stock of the journey and of thanking the people who have been part of it. When I …
Continue reading Looking back at a decade of Talking About Books
Published by Vintage / Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2022, 388 pages. First published in 2015. US title: The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe “Reading is a solitary act, but one that demands connection to the world.”—Lewis Buzbee, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, A History “The world was changing. And its books were changing me.” …
Continue reading Reading the World—How I Read a Book from Every Country: Ann Morgan
Photo: Triff via Shutterstock A young girl runs away to search for the illegitimate child she has had to give up. A boy leaves his family to look for his older brother. A woman tries to build bridges with her estranged son. A man tries to make sense of his younger brother’s death. When I …
Photo: Vipman via Shutterstock This article was inspired by My Life in Middlemarch, a bibliomemoir by Rebecca Mead, which draws on her readings of George Eliot’s Middlemarch over the years. I loved the idea of writing memoirs that are intertwined with a book. But since there isn’t a book I reread regularly, I thought that …
Published by Broadway Books, 2014, 309 pages. “Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does …
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